Hard to tell anything without hearing the same player and setup on a comparable grenadilla instrument, but it doesn't sound much like the S&S boxwood horns. The wood's a lot lighter, too, meaning that they didn't oil it to the extent S&S does. Still, it's nice to have the option of playing an instrument with the same wood Mühlfeld played, and that's not on the endangered list.

dorjepismo wrote: "The wood's a lot lighter, too, meaning that they didn't oil it to the extent S&S does."

That is the natural colour of boxwood. I may be mistaken, but I believe that the darker (and more aesthetically pleasing) brown colour that you see on most instruments made of boxwood is produced by an acid-staining technique and not merely by oiling. Perhaps someone else knows more about this?

Boxwood is known to be subject to warping and splitting. It would be interesting to know if Buffet have found a way of avoiding this. If not, I think that there may be some quality issues. I have a well-made boxwood flute that could double as a banana.

Liquorice, not knowledgeable about this myself, but I've seen billets and horns at S&S. The unprocessed billets are indeed the lighter color, the horns are nearly as dark as old horns in museums, and they talk about oiling but not acid-staining when you're there, and don't mention acid-staining in person or on the website anywhere. Here's a photo of Shirley Brill with one of them: http://www.shirleybrill.com/content/galleries/1/m/brill_broede_2.jpg.

Boxwood can be vacuum impregnated with tung oil, linseed oil or artificial resins to reduce the chance of warping and cracking. It absorbs it a lot better than blackwood.

Sometimes something in the wood can react with oils and darken quite dramatically. This happened to me when I made my classical clarinet. I had to remake one joint because it went very dark and no longer matched the rest of the instrument.

Nitric or dye staining is also possible.

An unstained boxwood instrument will darken a little over its first year or two due to oxidation but not as much as seen in the Shirley Brill picture. That one does look stained to me.

Whenever I hear (or see) the word "boxwood" - I immediately recall an 1844 quote from Cornelius Ward (a maker of instruments at the time) “[boxwood is]. . .more fit for a hygrometer than a musical instrument.”

Of course, I have no experience with boxwood, but I've always wondered if his statement was true.

They say they don't use coloring of any kind, and that the darkening is from oiling. I asked. The grenadilla is the same way. The billets are lighter, sort of milk chocolate, and have nice grain, more or less like the high end Buffets, but the finished instruments are straight black. Jochen specifically mentions linseed oil in his video on oiling instruments - https://youtu.be/gFcRYbSHkUo. In other threads, people have mentioned that linseed doesn't penetrate unless mixed with something else, and I don't know if hie does that, or if he uses a vacuum process when "seasoning" the wood. He also, by the way, plays a few notes in the video on a German system horn. Sounds pretty dark, and also like the Boehm system French bore ones I played there; they don't sound much like the videos of the Buffets. I understand they source the wood a little from Spain but mostly from Turkey.

Not a chance this will make it. The sound is so small in a world of ever growing clarinet sound (sizewise). The pitch ddoenst sound as supportedd and boxwood is extremely unstable. not to mention extremely fragile and id be interested to see how well it holds adjustment with that much keywork and that many posts drilled into it. Also, hard rubber is the way of the future. If not composites...

Well, S&S decided to start making modern boxwood clarinets after having made historical replica boxwood clarinets for decades. I don't know when that was, but it seems to be at least 10 years ago. They live on their reputation, which is substantially word of mouth. Jochen's reputation, in particular, has been impeccable with everyone I've asked or heard talk about him. When you try instruments out there, there mostly aren't "demo" horns. You try out stuff they are finishing up on and haven't delivered yet. Most of their Boehm instruments when I was there were boxwood, and they were headed for orchestras in Holland. If they hadn't figured out how to make stable boxwood instruments, they wouldn't be doing that. It's just not that kind of operation. They are careful, meticulous, responsible and principled people, and they guarantee their work, so they'd end up losing money on the things if they warped and/or cracked with any regularity.

Buffet, on the other hand, has done a prototype of one of their very good instruments in boxwood, with no history of making or selling boxwood instruments, presumably to see what it sounds like and whether there might be a market. That's fantastic, but it's not comparable with what S&S is doing, and more to the point, the instruments don't seem to sound very similar at all.

If you survey the auction sites everyday you'll see lots more old Buffet boxwood clarinets.

In the 1970's professor Bill McColl, who studied with Leopold Wlach in Vienna, commissioned Buffet to do make him a regular Boehm clarinet, probably with bore measurements similar to those of the R13, in boxwood. "One off" jobs like that have also been a recurrent part of Buffet's history. In the following clip you can see and hear Dr. McColl playing the Buffet boxwood with a chamber music group from the state of Washington: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCGnc7pWcsA.

I stand corrected, thanks! On the other hand, notice that the instrument Dr. McColl plays looks about as dark as the S&Ss, and it sounds a lot more like them than like the two videos of the new Legende prototype. Wonder what's going on with that.